Is President Bush the Monkey in the Middle?

"JUST HITTING
ANOTHER BRICK WALL"



"ABOUNA" SAYS:

Is President Bush the Monkey in the Middle?

House Democrats are pretending that their nonbinding resolution against the Iraq troop surge was of great import, anti-war champion Rep. John Murtha spoke the truth. It is not "the real vote," he said. That comes with Murtha's imminent attempt to hamstring President Bush's conduct of the war that may well spark a constitutional crisis.

Murtha wants to attach conditions on the impending supplemental appropriations bill to fund the war. He would require that troops have a year at home before redeploying, that they train with their own equipment before deploying and so on. Because the too-small U.S. military is under enormous strain, these conditions would be impossible to meet while still doubling the number of U.S. combat troops in Baghdad.

Murtha repeatedly says that his proposals are meant to "protect" the troops. But he is frank about the not-so-ulterior motive of keeping more troops from heading to Iraq, explaining that "they won't be able to do the work." Because his provisions can be sold as guaranteeing the readiness and quality-of-life of the troops, Murtha believes that they "will be very hard to find fault with."

The president, not Congress, is the commander in chief. Congress was never meant to, nor is it suited to, direct tactical military decisions, as Murtha seeks to do with his restrictions.

His maneuver will be the most blatant congressional intrusion on the president's war-making powers in the nation's history. Congress choked off the Vietnam War in the 1970s, but only after U.S. ground troops were mostly already out of the country and chiefly as a matter of cutting off aid to South Vietnam.

Murtha relies on failure in Iraq as a political strategy. The plan is a "slow-bleed" anti-war strategy. The surge is the best chance of turning the war around. By hampering it, Democrats will ensure that the war continues to fail, and thus that domestic political support for it plummets to the point where Democrats feel safe in de-funding it. It used to be that the war had to end because it was a failure; now it must fail so that it can end.

Democrats simply believe the war is irretrievably lost. But they still pay laughably unserious lip service to the notion of success. Murtha says there's no military solution in Iraq, that we can win in Iraq only through the political process — as if it has no effect on the political process whether Shia militias are murdering Sunnis unchecked or hiding out to avoid the surge. Murtha maintains that if we leave, "al-Qaeda’s going to disappear." What, when pigs fly?

President Bush will have no choice but to reject the Murtha restrictions should they reach his desk. But a veto is problematic. As Murtha points out, a veto means that Bush doesn't get the continued funding for the war. He might have to sign the bill, take the funding and ignore the restrictions as an unconstitutional trespass on his powers. In that event, a cry to impeach him will go up from the increasingly powerful anti-war left.

As a result of the Democrats' dirty little game could be a constitutional crisis from which no one — least of all the country — will emerge a winner.